


Bells and Hot Chocolate

by snailjamsge



Category: Original Work
Genre: Christmas, Co-workers, Decorating, Fiction, Flash Fiction, Holiday, Holidays, Hot Chocolate, Original Fiction, well not technically christmas because it's not technically mentioned, working
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-19
Updated: 2020-11-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:02:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27630437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snailjamsge/pseuds/snailjamsge
Summary: She doesn’t hate the holidays as much as everyone thinks she does.
Kudos: 1





	Bells and Hot Chocolate

She kicked the bells underneath her desk, the clanging reverberating against the linoleum floor. They laid, strewn about, held together only by the twisted threads laced around each bell. 

“Do you want to grab a hot chocolate?” The guy at the desk next to her asked, tapping his foot against the floor, sending out tiny bell noises as he walked closer to her desk. 

She grimaced. “Too sweet.”

But as he walked away, she not too delicately gulped down some hot chocolate hidden in her flask – a black, no-brand, definitely not holiday-related flask. 

It hadn’t started intentionally. She began working here a few years back, quickly gaining a reputation for being three things: cold, efficient, and unsociable outside of work. It wasn’t her fault. It couldn’t be helped that her coworkers wanted to talk about nonsense she was not in any way interested in. But here she was, years later, still putting up the same old scheme that she hated the holidays. 

Couldn’t they have any nuance about life? She thought, finishing the hot chocolate. 

Emboldened by his lack of acknowledgement about the bells, she carefully nudged them out from under the desk and quickly decorated his desk, which, after he soon returned, uplifted his face into a smile.

“Who put these here?” He asked.

“Wasn’t looking.”

His shoulders drooped down. “Oh.” Clearing his throat from the sickly sweet hot chocolate, “could you come with me to the supply cabinet for some stuff? It’s too much to carry by myself.”

“Uh, sure.”

The two walked side-by-side to the cabinet, deadly silent. She opened the wooden handle first, and suddenly, she was just as decorated as the tree on the first floor. 

Twisting and pulling at beads and lightbulbs and threaded popcorn, she spluttered “what is all of this? Get it off of me!”

But he only chuckled, kindhearted. “I was the last one to lock the cabinet up yesterday, and you were definitely the first one here this morning. I think you know what all of this is.”

Shoot. She was caught in the trappings of her own unintentional mess. A single bell bounced off and hit his shoe. 

“Fine. You caught me. It’s mine.”

“Well, that’s great!” His eyes twinkled. “Want to decorate together? The rest of the regular employees won’t be here for another hour.”

Discarding the decorations and lies like coats, she looked him straight in the eye. “I bet I can decorate better than you.”

“It’s on.”


End file.
